Jennifer and Sophia

This week is flyin but thankfully it has been a productive one! Yesterday I scrubbed our house and had a few fights with dust bunnies the size of small children. But I successfully won. The dry season just finished which causes our house to get dusty and dirty within a day so you can imagine how dirty it was after us being in the states for two months. We have a few families of rats in our ceiling as well and they cause dirt to come through the cracks in the roof. You'd think I live in Africa! We are grateful that rainy season has just began. Although in a few months when we're pushing our car out of the mud, my footwear goes from flip flops to rain boots, and I'm constantly scrubbing mud off of Elisha, I might change my mind. But now the nights and mornings are cooler. We also have a better chance of always having water. This past week the city hasn't been pumping water so we've had to get it elsewhere and pump it up into our tanks. We found out it was because the water company didn't pay their electricity bill. I mean really? We are in the process of getting high speed wireless internet. Yes, I typed that correctly. I know you Caldwells are dropping your jaw reading that. Now that we have more people living on our compound we can split the cost and it's well worth it! But we're not getting our hopes up. They've been working on it for two days now and nothing yet. Bud and Hollie are having high hopes while Todd and I know the reality that it probably wont happen. We're getting back into running and wow the altitude is killer. Todd ran with us this morning and showed us up. We're still debating on the 1/2 marathon in Lewa this June.

On to Mattaw stuff and enough random personal updates. The children are great. We just closed the school this week for holiday. All the schools in Kenya are closing for break. They are on break for one month. School here is year round. Most schools have tution which is extra tutoring. We'll be having that starting April 14th. All of our children have improved tremendously. I think it also helped that we hired a new teacher. We love our newest teacher. She definitely has a gift for children and for teaching. She motivates them and builds up their self esteem which is so critical for our kiddos. All of our children had an overall grade of 80% or more. Euni is doing great. We decided to take her back out to Mattaw on Monday. All of the children were so thrilled to have her back. Especially her momma Vivian. Vivian almost cried at the excitement to have her back. She had missed her a lot, it was encouraging to see that. You could sense the family that God has formed with them. It's amazing to think about really. How frustrating that those God had entrusted with these precious children had not been faithful or the enemy destroyed and now the Lord has taken obedient people in love with Him (Isaac and Vivian) and rebuilt a family with children that had none. I just love it.

We had a great meeting with Julius and Christabell yesterday. They will be our house parents for house two. They re-affirmed their calling and desire to serve at Mattaw. They will be taking baby Georgie starting Monday and then when they move into house 2, move him in with them. They have two girls of their own so they were excited to have a baby boy. Noah and Aron will also move into house two. They are currently in house one. Since Noah and Obadiah are babies, we took two extra boys in since there was beds for them. Now that house two is opening we are transferring these two and opening up a big boy bed for Obadiah in house one. Noah and Aron are cousins and they don't have any brothers or sister (sharon and Maurine are their cousins) so we can easily make the switch. We knew when taking them in that house two would open soon. An African proverb says that it takes a village to raise a family. It's so true! A child is out misbehaving and any adult has the authority to whip 'em. The same goes for Mattaw children's Village (not the anyone can whip any child part). It takes all our house parents together to raise all of these children. We hope to open house two this month before the school re-opens in May. Two girls identified to come into house two are Jennifer and Sophia. Jennifer comes from the family I have talked about where two of her siblings have passed away in the past year. She has a twin sister but the grandmother refuses to send her to us until the grandmother has passed away. In other words, this 8 year old girl is taking care of her grandmother until she passes away. When there was lack of food in the area, they sent the girls up to Turkana where the grandmother is. While we were in the states we had our social worker send for the girls to come. When we came back from the states we were told all of this and went to meet Jennifer. She is just as precious as can be. She was super shy and super small for her age. She is living with her aunt until we can take her. We've supplied some food for them until we take Jennifer since that was why they sent her away in the first place. The place is not good though. The aunt has many children and from what our social worker found it was not a good environment. And then we went and met Sophia. We drove way into the village to meet her. She lives with her grandmother. The day we went to meet her they had already moved mud huts from when Humphrey had visited them a few weeks before. We found the grandmother was at work and Sophia was there alone. The hut was locked up. She has a brother, Jose who is 6 I believe. He was off playing somewhere so we didn't get to meet him. My heart just ached to meet them knowing that they had to wait to come home to Mattaw. I was ready to take them to our house but we knew they'd be ok for a few more weeks. (Vicky- I know you're rolling your eyes at me even thinking about taking more children in our home, no worries, we didn't!) So please pray we would get house two open and full of another family. Here are the girls...

Sophia

Jennifer

Off to eat lunch at the coffee shop. Then off to have a staff meeting at Mattaw. We have these every Thursday afternoon. We'll be doing our weekly shopping for Mattaw tomorrow, which is done every Friday. Elisha is doing great, the next post will be all about him! (and maybe a bit on baby Georgie as well) I can't upload the pictures I have of Elisha and Georgie right now. Soon enough. Much love to you all.... Created for this, Kimberly